Games Get Gamut Of Athletes

SANFORD — There were Fugis beside Raleighs. An Olympic biker raced on the same quarter-mile track as a former Oakland Athletics trainer who rode a 10-speed for the first time in his 66 years.

The incongruity of a competition that pits former professional athletes against casual joggers was evident but understandable at most of the eight events Monday that opened the 11th-annual Golden Age Games.

Before the six-day Games ends Saturday, fitness fanatics and weekend athletes 55 and over will have their chance to shine in one of 41 events that range from the more sedentary checkers to the rigorous decathlon.

At the afternoon bike race, John Sinbaldi, who biked in the 1932 and 1936 Olympic Games, wore bike shorts atop his $1,200 Simoncini model while Joe Romo, who trained baseball players for 13 years before his 1982 retirement, wore his favorite jogging shorts to race on a borrowed Murray 10-speed.

Neither athlete showed signs of nervousness. Sinbaldi said he expected to collect another gold medal -- he has won the quarter-mile race each of the four years he has participated. The 72-year-old St. Petersburg man said he has no idea how many ribbons, medals and trophies he has won since he started biking competitively in 1928.

''I used to display them on plates, now they're stored away in barrels somewhere,'' said Sinbaldi, who has cut back his 500-mile-per-week training schedule to about 150 miles a week.

The bike race was one of nine events Romo plans to compete in. The 66- year-old Ocala man was making his first appearance at the Sanford Games and said he decided to enter the race after winning a similar race at the Ocala Senior Sun Games in September.

''I'm taking a chance,'' said Romo, who also played professional football in the '40s for the New York Giants and the Detroit Lions. ''I just plan to wing it. Fix it on one gear and go.'' Romo won the Ocala race on a bike he described as ''the old fashioned type with a basket on the back.''